Walking the line between complex and convoluted plotting, The Kill Room is a dark comedy throwback starring Uma Thurman and Samuel L Jackson. It’s the first time these two have appeared together since 2004’s Kill Bill: Vol 2.
The time before that was Pulp Fiction and it’s obvious that it’s the Tarantino connection that this movie is really all about.
Thurman plays Patrice, a gallery owner on the skids. Jackson is Gordon, the local baker whose store is a front for a crime operation. He comes up with a novel scheme for laundering the vast sums of cash that come his way. He’ll buy worthless tat from her for a vastly inflated sum – cash of course – and she’ll write a cheque for him, deducting a middlewoman’s fee. Everyone’s happy especially as the taxman’s usual method of spotting this kind of ruse – the disparity between the value of something and the price paid for it – do not apply.
But Patrice needs tat to sell. Gordon’s henchman and contract killer Reggie has soon been pressed into service as an art-by-the-yard dauber. And what do you know, in an echo of The Producers (Thurman appeared in the 2005 remake), the phoney artist suddenly, accidentally become the next big thing, causing problems all round.
As Reggie’s art moves on from paint to more conceptual works – the bloody plastic bags he has suffocated people with – “the Bagman”, a Banksie-esque nickname, becomes a celebrity, a star.
Director Nicol Paone and writer Jonathan Jacobson take shots at most aspects of the art world – the gallerists, artists, critics, collectors, groupies, interns and hangers-on – all of them presented as being vastly up themselves. It’s funny, at times, and probably guffaw-inducing if you’re part of the demographic that takes the “my kid could have done that” line on modern art.
You can imagine Jacobson sitting down with a big bag of cocaine to write it, in much the way so many movies followed in the wake of Tarantino’s first flowering seemed to have been written. It’s busy and bitty and it doesn’t always make sense but Thurman and Jackson understand what sort of energy is required and give it their best shot.
She plays to her reputation of being a bit of a swishy diva while he cackles, winks and wise-cracks Gordon into three dimensions, a solidity most of the other characters never quite achieve.
Maya Hawke, Thurman’s daughter with Ethan Hawke, plays a pissy young artist, her first collaboration with mama, and Dree Hemingway, daughter of Mariel, plays a rival gallerist with a deadly line in put-downs. The nepotism of the art world is never referred to.
Lost somewhere in all this is Joe Manganiello, as killer Reggie, the phoney artist who becomes a real one. He holds the screen in early scenes on his own but he’s more a device than a full character, especially once the game is afoot.
Towards the end things take a bit of a dive with the introduction of a Russian gangster and his wannabe son. Things get a bit more Tarantino than strictly necessary, and suddenly there are just way too many characters on screen, though these two do eventually figure in a conclusion which will just about satisfy everybody.
It’s not quite slick enough to be a madcap tear, not quite smart enough to nail the art world to the cross of its own pretensions but it is lively and fun and there’s even a few references to the Dutch conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader, who died in 1975 on a “conceptual” crossing from the US to Europe on a 13ft sailboat. In his case reality had the last word. Everyone’s a critic.
The Kill Room – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
